Swann's Way by Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

Proust’s recollections cause me to reflect on my own life in the same manner, and I found myself slowing down my thoughts to match the pace of his narrator.
It was a lovely feeling.
-http://dolcebellezza.net

Synopsis

Swann's Way is one of the preeminent novels of childhood-a sensitive boy's impressions of his family and neighbors, all brought dazzlingly back to life years later by the famous taste of a madeleine. It also enfolds the short novel Swann's Love, an incomparable study of sexual jealousy, which becomes a crucial part of the vast, unfolding structure of In Search of Lost Time. The first volume of the book that established Proust as one of the finest voices of the modern age-satirical, skeptical, confiding, and endlessly varied in his response to the human condition-Swann's Way also stands on its own as a perfect rendering of a life in art, of the past re-created through memory.

Marcel Proust was born in the Parisian suburb of Auteuil on July 10, 1871. He began work on In Search of Lost Time sometime around 1908, and the first volume, Swanns Way, was published in 1913. In 1919 the second volume, Within a Budding Grove, won the Goncourt Prize, bringing Proust great and instantaneous fame. Two subsequent installmentsThe Guermantes Way (192021) and Sodom and Gomorrah (1921)appeared in his lifetime. The remaining volumes were published following Prousts death on November 18, 1922: The Captive in 1923, The Fugitive in 1925, and Time Regained in 1927.

Critic reviews for Swann's Way
All: 2 | Positive: 1 | Negative: 1

Bianca Pellet

Reviewed by Bianca Pellet
on
Jul 25 2010

The first volume's poetry, complexity and highly synaesthetic approach all serves to hook the reader totally and utterly, despite the faults in the novel's construction, leaving readers awaiting the next instalment with bated breath.